You're right. I grew up in an independent evangelical church so I've been attuned to all this since I got out in my teens. To emphasize - American Evangelical Christianity is especially insidious about this on multiple levels. In contrast to Mainline Protestantism, the entire movement is based on two particularly pernicious things that map to cultlike methods.

They are taught to blindly follow and never question authority. The pastor is the "shepherd" of the "flock" and they openly talk about it in terms echoing the way that the Disciples followed Jesus. And there's a reason you hear about what seem to be so many nasty stories of evangelical religious leaders abusing their power than mainline ones. And there's a reason authoritarian politics are so closely identifiable with evangelism in America.

Second, they work HARD TO create an in-group and out-group. There are the "saved" and everyone else. If you're "unsaved" and attend the church, the pressure is INTENSE to commit. RELENTLESS. And once you're in, you're on the inside of an "us against the world" mentality. I'll give an example. You know the current "War On Christmas?" People walking around like NPC's saying "I don't care, I'm going to say Merry Christmas - since when did that become a crime, none of this 'Happy Holidays' stuff!"

I remember being inside the movement in the eighties, and the thing they were completely up in arms about then was that businesses were co-opting Jesus's name by using "Christmas" to sell stuff. So the move to "Happy Holidays" by corporate America wasn't just an inclusive, religiously-neutral way to put it. I distinctly remember listening to christian radio at the time and the conversation being about pressure campaigns to get "Merry Christmas" out of businesses. I'm sure businesses were happy to oblige to stop the PR onslaught. It was the "War on Christmas" of its day. And twenty years later when it fits their agenda to creating division between believers and non-believers? The entire thing reversed directions.

I'd rather say that such conduct is mostly confined to evangelicals. Mainstream Christianity teaches that prophecy ceased with Maleachi, and form then onwards we have only the traditions of the Church to go by. That would include a sober ("chaste") lifestyle.

This actually depends on your denomination quite a bit. What you're outlining is a fairly conservative approach. There's a decent sized amount of "charismatic" Christians who firmly believe in prophecy here and now. What qualifies as prophecy, and how to handle it can differ quite a bit from congregation to congregation.

Is charismatic christianity not entirely under the evangelical umbrella?

Those are evangelicals. It goes back to the problem of Protestantism’s sola scriptura philosophy, rejecting 1500 years of theological inquiry and study - something that didn’t happen with Orthodoxy or Catholicism.

There are non Protestant charismatics.

I would say you are probably simplifying this a lot. It's extremely standard to believe God will lead you to, call you to, arrange for you to, etc. move in a given direction. (Pastors, at least in protestant denominations I am familiar with, are "called" to their new jobs, in church parlance, and are "led" to seek new roles.)

I would say most people do not expect God to set a bush ablaze and speak verbally to them, but make it obvious they should do this or that thing.

Of course, one would hope that a pastor would realize feeling called to scam money from his congregation to renovate his house and buy a car to come from Satan, not God. But temptation is strong. :P

One of the cessationists criticisms of prohecy was that it leads to man/self aggrandizing and away from written truthes. It's a positioned that is a poisoned well that naturally creates scammy behavior and fosters a spiritual hierarchy and gnostic heresies.

That's why many conservative evangelicals did mock and accuse charismatic tv preachers of being grifters, unrepresentive and false teachers. Though that public tension and conflict seems to be abandoned for the sake of political unity nowadays.

I've known calvinistic missionaries (all dead now) from these groups, they speak of being burdened, and "feeling" called, but they're clear that a personal burden is not a revelation or prophecy, it's just a personal conviction from the text combined with circumstances and an affinity of where to go, not the voice of god. No different than a person feeling convicted to become vegetarian because of something they read. They cited some passages from paul about going where "he choose" (I've no interest in looking that passage up at this point) and the use of casting of lots to show it's internally driven conviction and pragmatism and not a revelatory special calling. Being explicit that anyone hearing the voice of God probably needed medical help, personal prophecy wasn't a source of inspiration and truth but were warned against.

Literally every Christian denomination believes in communication from God, whether that counts as "prophecy" or not.

Well, yes, Marian apparitions are a thing, but the Virgin isn't going to tell anyone to go out and buy a Porsche.

The way this understanding is generally formulated is that "public revelation ended with the death of the last Apostle", but I have not actually encountered this as a formally defined teaching or doctrine.

Cessationism.

It's been a big part of the modernistic bent of the dominant Calvinistic protestant denominations. It was also drove the focus on literacy and certainly influenced the trend towards academic and textual rigor.

Widely abandoned in the U.S. only quite recently by low and high protestant calvanistic conservative groups alike.

Pentecostal and charismatic groups have been around obviously but weren't taken too seriously and were even warned against by dominant evangelicalism, but that has relatively recently changed in conservative Presbyterian circles and influential groups in baptist circles like Sovereign Grace Churches (though they aren't baptist, they've become heavily culturally entwined via southern seminary and other places).

This has basically reintroduced miracles and promoted an embrace of magical thinking in laity's daily life that was long absent from those bookish, stuffy, severe, and practical protestants.

No, cessationism is about charismatic gifts, but the GP mentioned "prophecy" and I'm referring to "public revelation" so now we've got a thread with three different concepts being bandied about and debated as if they're central to a single controversy.

Prophecy is explicitly one of the charismatic gifts.